Blood and urinary aggregator and inhibitor composition in controls and renal-stone patients from northeastern Thailand.

Renal-stone disease (RSD) is common in the rural communities of northeastern Thailand. We report the biochemical composition of blood and urine in 25 healthy city dwellers (G1), 12 healthy village dwellers (G2) and 25 village dwellers who had RSD (G3). They were male with a range of ages between 20 and 50 years and were free of renal failure, urinary infection, urinary obstruction and systemic illness. The results showed that hypocitraturia, hypokalemia and hypokaliuria were more common in the latter 2 groups. The 24-h urinary citrate excretion correlated significantly with urinary potassium in G3 cases (r = 0.704, p = 0.0002). After potassium chloride supplementation, serum and urinary potassium increased remarkably (p less than 0.003 and p = 0.002, respectively), whereas urinary citrate remained unchanged. Our results suggest that the predominant abnormality in our RSD patients were hypocitraturia and potassium deficiency and that these may be related.